Some of America’s best Mid Century Modern architecture is in the form of gas stations, with their simple space requirements and focus on innovative roofs. Several of the best known names in architecture have created gas stations, around the world, including Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies Van der Rohe, Willem Dudok, Jean Prouve, Arne Jacobsen and Norman Foster, but nobody created a design package that was as enduring and comprehensive as Elliot Noyes for Mobil.

Although this image shows a contemporary Mobil gas station, the influence of Noyes, who created on of the strongest architectural branding exercises in American history, is still clearly visible. Many Mobil gas stations around the world are unnoticed modernist works of art.

There are actually two Mies gas stations in the US, but although he would have been the ideal architect to design a gas station, in both cases they were an afterthought, ancillary to a main project. <p /><p />We are including the IIT one rather than Nuns island, which although arguably better, was merely signed off by Mies, having been designed largely by someone else in the office (not that this is unusual in architects offices).